Famous!

This is so cool! Whilst in Punta Arenas, Chile, some guy came up to us and took our picture. We were a bit suspicious (he said he worked for a radio station... photos on the radio?), but look: www.radiopolar.com!

If you want a bit of context, we were sitting in the Plaza de Armas, and had just finished eating our lunch (Nutella sandwiches :). That's Katherine's Pinsents bag between us. We were watching the American tourists from the cruise ship buy wool sweaters at the market stalls - from which we had just bought Pedro, our fluffy penguin buddy.

I think I look a bit smug (... and scarily blond).

Economics

Nice to see that the dollar is plummeting in value against the pound ($1 = 54p). Because South America's economy is linked to USA's, that's good for us :).

... I think. I was never much good at economics :(.

Peliculas

Below you'll find a list of all the films we've seen in cinemas so far. We've sat through plenty more on buses, but that would make the list about ten times bigger, so I haven't bothered with those.

Perhaps the most notable thing about our cinematogaphy (is that the right word? I suspect not) is my dreadful taste in movies :).

Cinematography

Last updated: 12th February 2004

The Medallion, Vancouver, Canada (Tom & Katherine)
Le Divorce, Vancouver, Canada (Tom & Katherine)
Freddy Vs. Jason, Seattle, USA (Tom)
Underworld, Albuquerque, USA (Tom & Andy)
The Matrix Revolutions, Quito, Ecuador (Tom)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Valparaíso, Chile (Tom)
Love Actually, Puerto Madryn, Argentina (Tom & Katherine)
Runaway Jury, Puerto Madryn, Argentina (Tom & Katherine)
The Last Samurai, Buenos Aires, Argentina (Tom & Katherine)
Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Buenos Aires, Argentina (Tom & Katherine)
Seabiscuit, Buenos Aires, Argentina (Tom & Katherine)
Lost in Translation, Buenos Aires, Argentina (Tom & Katherine)

Mendoza

And so we're here now in Mendoza. For those whose South American geography is "lacking", Mendoza is more or less due east of Santiago in Chile, just on the other side of the Andes. It's a prosperous university city, one of Argentina's biggest, and a big wine-producing area (more trips to vineyards are in the offing!).

We arrived early this morning, about 6am, and waited an hour before heading to our hotel. It turned out to be great value - things are getting cheaper as we head northwards, it seems -, since we've got a huge room with private bath, fan, cable TV and a big breakfast for Ar$30 (about 6 pounds). For comparison, in San Martín, Ar$40 got us two dorm beds with shared bath.

After a doze to sleep off the effects of the bus journey we caught up on the news from BBC World (we sat through an hour of commentary about the Hutton Report, not really understanding what was going on - we've been away too long, obviously!). Breaking news: some top BBC honcho is resigning. After watching an episode of the current series of Friends (don't you just love cable TV?) we headed out into Mendoza to explore.

We're off back to our hotel now, and we have a bit of a dilemma. The tenedor libre doesn't open until 20.30, and there's a new episode of The West Wing (our favourite drama by a long way!) at 22.00. Can we stuff enough in in one and a half hours? The buffet doesn't close until 00.30, but could we wait that long? (We haven't had lunch, in preparation!). Oh, such difficult decisions!

Bariloche & San Martín de los Andes

We zoomed through the Lakes District at high speed, stopping for just one night each in Bariloche and San Martín. Both are similar: touristy towns on the shores of a lake, full of Argentinian and European travellers. They're both perfectly nice: in the former we looked at the traditional Lakes architecture and did a spot of shopping; in the latter we did a little 1.5 hour hike up to the Mirador to look down at views of the town and lake, and paddled in the lake for a bit.

The scenery is considerably better than it has been for a while, and the climate is getting much, much warmer. No need for fleeces any more: we're drinking rosé now (we got a bottle of our favourite Concha y Toro for US$1).

The bus companies are also getting better. We got two films on the journey from San Martín to Neuquén (where we changed buses). Then the Andesmar trip from Neuquén to Mendoza was particularly exciting, as we served a meal - gnocchi (ñoquis in Spanish!) in a beef and carrot sauce (for obvious reasons, I got two!), with crème caramel and a glass of Sprite. How they managed to heat the ñoquis up on a bus is beyond me - these things must be pretty well-equipped. And, because this is Argentina, we had it at 22.30!

Wales

I can't help but suspect that Patagonia was attractive to Welsh people because of the cold, wet, miserable climate.

All-you-can-eat

There's something in my psychological make-up that means I'm unable to resist eating, literally, all I possibly can! Las Vegas was a real treat, because I was able to stuff myself on shrimp and other yummy food for $10. That was good enough, but Argentina is better: their tenedores libres are a third of the price.

Katherine and Andy are both useless at eating, and so never really get good value from these things. I, on the other hand, get good value in the sense that I eat a lot, but terrible value because I spend the next two hours feeling terribly bloated. As Andy can attest, I spent most of the time in Las Vegas stumbling around groaning, or just lying down. And so, as is my want, I over-stuffed myself in Puerto Madryn and sat through Runaway Jury wishing I was dead. Oh well.

There's another tenedor libre here in Mendoza, so it looks like I'm about to make the same mistake again :(.

Lots of new photos

Too many to list, but there are loads of cute penguins and impressive glaciers in there!

Update: ... And they've all got captions, now, too! (The penguin ones in particular are pretty lame :).

Puerto Madryn ...

... is where we are. The bus journey was an epic, lasting 16 hours, but we finally arrived at 2pm this afternoon. Finding accommodation turned out to be a bit problematic, but we got somewhere in the end, and arranged to move to somewhere a bit classier (and closer to the beach! :) tomorrow. It's better value for money, you see, but was full when we arrived.

Puerto Madryn seems nice - it's your typical beach resort. We spent the day wandering around the city and doing some shopping. Tonight we're going to (hopefully) see "Amor Realmente" in the cinema - care to guess what the English translation of that is?

Hint: the answer's Love Actually - I'd rather be seeing SWAT myself, but Katherine used her executive veto :(.

Tomorrow we hit the beach - this time we're in the Atlantic. The day after, the plan is to take a local bus out to the little villages nearby, many of which retain a strong Welsh influence. Afternoon teas all round :).

Bibliography

Last updated: 11th February 2004

Tom
Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire
Issac Asimov, Robot Dreams
Jane Austen, Lady Susan
Iain Banks, Complicity
Iain Banks, Walking on Glass
Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art
James Birrell, The Mañana Man
Sandra Brown, The Alibi
Tom Clancy, Executive Orders
Jenny Colgan, Talking to Addison
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Stephen Coonts, Deep Black
Martin Cruz Smith, Polar Star
Patricia D. Cornwell, All That Remains
Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry
John Grisham, A Painted House
John Grisham, King of Torts
John Grisham, The Street Lawyer
Robert Harris, Archangel
Katharine Hepburn, Little Me
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Iris Johansen, No One to Trust
Alastair MacLean, Puppet on a Chain
John McEnroe, Serious
L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Chris Ryan, The Kremlin Device
Gene Savoy, On the Trail of the Feathered Serpent
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
Rupert Thomson, The Insult
Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent
Scott Turow, The Burden of Proof
Sara Wheeler, Travels in a Thin Country
John Wyndham, Web

Katherine
Maeve Binchy, Scarlet Feather
James Birrell, The Mañana Man
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Sandra Brown, The Alibi
John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps
Jenny Colgan, Talking to Addison
T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain
Patricia D. Cornwell, All That Remains
Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry
John Grisham, King of Torts
John Grisham, Skipping Christmas
John Grisham, The Street Lawyer
Robert Harris, Archangel
Katharine Hepburn, Little Me
Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth
Iris Johansen, No One to Trust
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Marion Keyes, Angels
John McEnroe, Serious
L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Francine Pascal, Sweet Valley High: Playing with Fire
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Gene Savoy, On the Trail of the Feathered Serpent
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
Rupert Thomson, The Insult
Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent
Scott Turow, The Burden of Proof
John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick
Sara Wheeler, Travels in a Thin Country
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

The Falkland Islands

We're getting used to the new currency. The Argentinian peso (ARS, or just $) used to worth exactly US$1, but after the country's economic problems it's worth a bit less. Converting to pounds is easy - just divide by 5, so Ar$1 is 20p. Internet access here is Ar$2 an hour, which is pretty cheap compared to Chile.

Anyway, the 10 peso note has a picture General Manuel Belgrano on the front, which, inevitably, reminded me of the Falkland Islands. I'd kind of like to visit, but flights there are hugely expensive, and there's really nothing to do except look at sheep, so we'll probably give it a miss!

Rio Gallegos

Public transport is sporadic at best in this part of the world, and so getting from place to place is no longer as easy as it was in Northern Chile. No doubt things will improve once we're out of Patagonia, but until then it'll mean a few frustrating waits. One such delay is getting from El Calafate to just about anywhere. We managed to get on a bus to Rio Gallegos, which is a small city, rather bleak but friendly, with nothing much to be said for it. We stayed here last night, and our bus for Puerto Madryn leaves tonight at 8.30, so we've had a lazy day playing on the Internet, eating pizza and window-shopping. We popped into the local museum - we were expecting something boring, but it turned out to be pretty cool, full of interactive science stuff and some huge skeletons / models of extinct dinosaurs and mammals that used to roam the earth. So we've had an agreeable enough day, all told.

Lunchtime tomorrow we'll be in Puerto Madryn. Sound a bit Welsh? That's because it is. More when we get there!

Argentina

Penguins! (And Punta Arenas)

Maybe Katherine should be writing this, because I'll probably embarass myself getting all soppy about penguins...

The most exciting thing today around Punta Arenas is visiting Seno Otway, which is the breeding grounds for about 11,000 penguins every year. "Tours", such as they are, are cheap and cheerful. We paid $5,000 each to get there, and $2,500 to get in (7 pounds total). Once at Seno Otway, you follow a 1km wooden boardwalk that takes you right through the middle of the fields in which the penguins build their nests. For whatever reason, penguins don't really care about humans, and so they're completely fearless, and you can get really close (2m or so) to them. The path parallels the route the penguins use to get from the sea to their nests, so we had fun betting on which penguin would get home first (I won 2.5-0.5). The path they take is always the same - it varies from penguin to penguin, but each individual always goes the same way. Their routes are often convoluted, and involve some tricky jumps - penguins jumping is just about the coolest thing I've ever seen! So anyway, penguins are really cute, and we took far too many photos. They had their babies a month or so ago, so they were almost fully grown, shedding their brown fluff and getting proper feathers.

These are Magallenes penguins, by the way - they're quite small, as far as penguins go, and are all black-and-white with a black stripe running across the top of their chests. They mate for life ("divorce rate" is 10%), and always return to the place they were born to breed themselves. In March they all leave for warmer climes - Brazil and the Falkland Islands, and come back in November.

To remind us of our happy times in the pingüineras (I guess the English equivalent is "penguinery") at Seno Otway I bought Katherine a fluffy Magallenes penguin in the market at Punta Arenas :). Cute!

Back in Punta Arenas, as well as visting the small, touristy market on Sunday morning, we popped into the palace of Josefina Menendez and her husband Mauricio Braun. Punta Arenas used to be very important for sheep cultivation, as well as having a strategic location on the Strait of Magellan. After the Panama Canal ("a man, a plan, a canal, Panama", remember...) the area declined in importance, and there's not much left now. Still, the old palaces of the shipping barons are in good nick, and this one in particular was well-restored to its turn-of-the-century splendour.

All this money in Punta Arenas attracted a lot of foreigners, especially Brits, Swiss, Czechs and Germans. Consequently the city's cemetery is a tourist attraction in itself. The important Braun and Menendez families have huge, opulent mausoleums, and the "regular" graves are often for people with English or Eastern European names. It's very well kept, and was an interesting morning out!

We went up to the Mirador to look down over Punta Arenas, and spotted a cruise ship docked in the port - hence all the annoying American tourists waddling around :). I enjoyed my first proper sight of the Strait of Magellan, once the world's most important sea lane, now practically empty.

Postscript: the Menendez shipping empire survives to this day - it's now called Navimag. Cool, no?

Puerto Natales - Punta Arenas

Lots more to talk about for these two outposts, but no time. We're off penguin-spotting in forty minutes! Try again in a few days :).

Tom's Excruciatingly Detailed Log of the Voyage

Ship's Log
Monday 12th January : Day 1
09.30: We check-in at Navimag's Puerto Montt office. Predictably, we're rather too early, but it mans we get two good berths (one on top of the other, by a window).
14.30: Kathy (guide 1) tells us all about M/N Magallanes. Boarding begins, starting with AAA passengers (most posh), then AA (posh), then A (less posh), and finally C (scum).
15.00: We finaly get aboard M/N Magallanes, and sort out our stuff in our berths. Miraculously our bags have materialised intact and in the right place (we didn't tip the luggage guy).
16.00: Everyone assembles on the top deck for a safety drill. Half of us get life jackets and we all mill around for a bit.
16.30: M/N Magallanes leaves Puerto Montt. Toot toot!
17.00: Introductory talk in the mess hall by Kathy. Clearly alcoholism is a common problem.
17.30: Nicole (guide 2) gives an enthusiastic talk in Spanish on the geography and culture of Chiloé and Puerto Montt. Eduardo (guide 3) translates, with somewhat less enthusiasm.
19.30: Green ticket holdesr (us) go down to the mess hall for dinner: leek soup; chicken and mashed potatoes; fake crème caramel; coffee. Not bad. After a brief delay, Katherine gets a vegetable stew.
20.15: Our carton of red wine (Víña Concha y Toro, of course) is broken out. Yum.
21.30: We watch What Lies Beneath in the mess hall.
22.00: Katherine leaves, unable to cope with the What that Lies Beneath.
22.45: Turns out it was Harrison Ford all along.
23.30: Tucked up in our cosy beds.
Tuesday 13th January : Day 2
07.00: I inexplicably wake up before Katherine's alarm goes off.
07.30: Shower (luxurious, considering); dress (requires considerable agility to maintain one's dignity).
08.00: Breakfast - scrambled eggs, bread, cheese, ham (two bits for me - hurrah!), banana, porridge, coffee (or tea) etc.
10.00: Briefing. Today's activities are outlined.
10.30: We attend a lecture on the fauna of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, given by a 'trainee guide'. Humph. We want the real thing.
11.30: We watch Survival Island, not a reality TV show, but a BBC documentary (narrated, inevitably, by David Attenborough) about the wildlife of South Georgia, which has a lot in common with this part of the world. Penguins, it turns out, are very cute, unless they're being eaten by seals.
14.00: Lunch - we're on shift two (green ticket) today, so we have to wait a bit longer. Lunch is a slab of beef with rice, and the usual soup, drink, and so on.
15.30: Another 'trainee guide' gives a lecture on the culture of the natives who used to live in the area, the ones Darwin called "sub-human" or something. There are about ten left... All very well, but we want Nicole!
16.00: We go up to the bridge to watch the crew steer the ship round a corner. I poke about with the ballast controls and almost sink us (just kidding).
16.15: I watch Gladiator in the mess hall. Katherine, unimpressed by Ridley Scott's epic, has a siesta instead.
17.30: The visceral battle scenes gain an extra dimension when the Magallanes hits open seas and begins to rock rather unsettlingly.
20.00: Dinner is served. Spag bol today, not that it matters - I manage all of about three mouthfuls before giving up in despair. Not like me at all.
21.30: We watch Bruce Almighty, while the ship continues to lurch horribly.
23.30: Bed, sleep. Much to my chagrin, throughout the evening Katherine has remained blissfully untouched by the stomach-churning swells.
Wednesday 14th January : Day 3
07.30: Normal waking-up routine. The Magallanes is now back in some channel or other, and mercifully we are running smoothly once more.
08.00: Breakfast. Today's jam is raspberry.
08.30: We kill time before the briefing with Scrabble in the pub.
10.00: Briefing, which is about to segue into a lecture on Puerto Natales, Punta Arenas on Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, when...
10.30: The Magallanes enters the English Straits, then passes the wreck of a Greek cargo ship that crashed into the wreck of an ancient English ship that ran aground. Everyone crowds on deck to have a look.
10.45: We listen to the lecture in Spanish first, and they're about to do it in English, when...
11.15: The ship arrives at Puerto Eden. We anchor off-shore, and several launches come out of the port to meet us. A couple of passengers (locals, presumably) get off, and some get on. The whole procedure takes about half an hour.
11.45: The lecture resumes, in English.
12.30: Lunch. Fish and veggies. This time I manage to eat everything (plus some of Katherine's).
13.30: The next two hours are spent reading, playing Tetris and drinking red wine-
15.30: We learn about Chilean slang (in Spanish).
16.00: We learn about Chilean slang (in English).
16.30: Billy Elliot - a rather incongruous choice of film, I can't help but think.
19.30: First sitting at dinner today. A big slab of turkey (a fried egg for Katherine) and cheesy potatoes.
20.30: In the bar, we finish off our wine, and buy a bingo card for later tonight.
22.00: The bingo is a disaster, we win nothing. At least we got all the wine drunk...
Thursday 15th January : Day 4
00.45: We finally make it to bed.
06.00: Urgh! Too early! But we get up anyway - the ship is travelling through a particularly scenic narrow strait (which can only be navigated in daylight) so we stumble out bleary-eyed to have a look. Our stamina is rewarded when from the bridge we spy a sleek grey dolphin jumping through the water at close range.
07.30: Early breakfast is served in the mess hall.
08.00: The Magallanes anchors off-shore near Puerto Natales, waiting for permission to dock.
09.00: Safely ashore at Puerto Natales - dry land for the first time since Monday.

Homage to Patagonia

Well, the Magallanes docked in Puerto Natales safe and sound after a three-day cruise through the fjords and channels of Patagonia. This is as close to the end of the earth as I've ever been, and we'll be getting closer in the next couple of days as we head south to Punta Arenas and then east into Argentina.

I kept a excruciatingly detailed log of the voyage, which I'll post here when we find somewhere with cheaper Internet access :).

Navimag

We've just been to the port to check-in. The Magallanes will set sail (or so they claim) at 14.30 this afternoon. Everything seems to be going well so far!

If you want to trace our route, find a map of southern Chile. See all those thousands of little islands? We'll be sailing right through the middle of them. If you never hear from us again, our ship will probably have sunk in the Golfo de Penas - the Gulf of Despair. Failing that we'll be in Puerto Natales, way south, in three or four days.

Travels in a Thin Country

I've just finished reading Travels in a Thin Country by Sara Wheeler - close to my heart, because she's an (Oxford) modern linguist. Katherine read it while I was still ploughing through Solzhenitsyn.

It's an interesting book, about the author's travels in Chile. She did more or less the same things as us: north to south, with stops at the El Tatio geysers, the Concha y Toro vineyard, Santiago and so on. She even catches the same ship that we're about to board on Monday. She also took lots of pointless detours deep into the Andes, and to be honest she didn't seem to have as much fun as we did! Still, if you want to learn more about the places we've been to (in a more eloquent style than Katherine and I could ever hope to achieve :-) it's an interesting read.

Seventy?!

I took seventy photos in San Pedro de Atacama (where we spent New Year's Eve). Far too many! They're all on ImageStation now, although we haven't the stamina to write captions for every single one of them just yet.

Leaving Santiago

After lunch in McDonald's (oh dear...) we climbed up Cerro Santa Lucia, an incongruous hill smack-bang in the middle of downtown Santiago. The views are impressive, but the oppressive pollution makes the views of the Andes a bit hazy! Back down at sea level, we wandered through cute little Barrio Paris y Londres, before ending up in this Internet café. From now, we're just killing time until our bus leaves from Santiago's southern terminal at 21.00. We're going to Valdivia, where we plan to stay a couple of nights, then reaching Puerto Montt before the weekend. That'll gives us a couple of days to explore the port before our cruise ship (or, more accurately, "converted cargo ferry") leaves on Monday at 16.00.

Pablo Neruda

I spent half my university career studying Pablo Neruda in one way or another. He's Chile's greatest poet, won a Nobel Prize for literature, and ranks as one of the top five poets of the twentieth century (top one, if you ask me). And so we couldn't very well come to Santiago and not visit his house.

We took the Metro out to Barrio Bellavista and walked up to La Chascona, one of Neruda's three houses in Chile. He lived here with his third wife, Matilde, whose nickname was La Chascona after her perpetually unruly hair. We took a tour: the house had been mostly destroyed by the good old Chilean military in the 1973 coup, but it is now restored more or less as it would have been when Neruda lived there. We walked through his dining room, three (!) bars, bedroom, library and study. Neruda, as any Cambridge Modern Linguist will tell you, was obsessed with the sea, and La Chascona was constructed along the lines of a ship - low ceilings, squeaky floors, often at wacky angles, and lights and furniture taken from actual vessels. It was all very interesting, especially for me!

Viña Concha y Toro

That morning I had rung up the Concha y Toro vineyard to reserve a spot on their English-language tour that afternoon. We were pretty lucky to get a place, as you're supposed to let them know at least four days in advance.

Getting there on public transport is not entirely trivial. We caught the Metro to the end of the line, and then a number 80 bus out towards Pirque. For some reason our bus insisted on going along practically every little detour it could find, so we finally arrived about half an hour late. (Very embarrassing for English people to be late!).

The guy on the door recommended that we wait and join the 16.00 tour in Spanish, which would have been OK, but we kind of got swept along with things, and ended up joining the second half of the 15.00 English tour. After that was over, we joined the Spanish tour anyway, so we got one-and-a-half tours in total. Which turned out to be a very good thing.

The tour starts outside the original mansion in which the vineyard's founder lived, with a nice glass of Sauvignon Blanc, goes through the gardens, and stops for a rest next to the Cabernet Sauvignon vines. In the shade of the surrounding trees, we tried a glass of the Concha y Toro Merlot - very nice, we both thought - and then moved on to the cellars underground. We marvelled at the extra-expensive wines down there - each barrel of their best stuff is worth US$15,000, and there are a lot of barrels! Sadly we didn't get to try any of that... We finished up in the wine shop, where we got to try some Cabernet Sauvignon, which was OK, but not a patch on the Merlot, or the white.

Of course, we got rather more wine than we'd bargained for, because we did the tour twice (purely by mistake, honest!). Needless to say we were rather merry by the time we'd finished the second tour, and so the journey back to our hotel seemed to go much more quickly! We got to keep the glasses we'd been trying the wine in, so we've now got two gorgeous "Concha y Toro"-brand red wine glasses - which will almost inevitably break before we can get them home.

So, now we're big fans of Concha y Toro wine - check it out in Sainsbury's. CyT is Chile's biggest vineyard. Their most expensive stuff, Don Something-or-other, costs about $50 a bottle, but their Trio range is much more affordable (we saw it in the shops here for about $4, though it'll probably be more expensive in England).

Santiago

We got the bus from Valparaíso to Santiago on Monday morning. After a bit of a struggle to find a hotel that wasn't full, we checked in to Residencial Tabita and headed out to explore Chile's capital city.

Our first stop was the offices of Navimag, where we bought two tickets onboard the M/N Magallanes, which will take us on a cruise from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales next Monday. You can read all about the exciting journey through narrow straits and past huge glaciers at the website - it sounds fantastic, and we can't wait!

We went for a pizza in an exclusive Italian restaurant, wining and dining with high-powered Chilean executives.

Next up was our attempts to buy a Lonely Planet (or indeed any) guide book to Argentina. Sadly we failed, and after visiting about five different bookshops we gave up. We might come across one later on, if not we'll just have to rely on the trimmed-down version in South America on a Shoestring.

Whilst zooming back and forth on Santiago's very swish Metro system, we noticed lots of adverts for something called the Third International Jazz Festival. We decided to go along and have a look (or listen). Entry was free, the concert was held outdoors in a park in downtown Santiago. As it happened, Monday was the opening night - the acts were 3 X Luka from Chile and an American and a Canadian musician, neither of whose names we can remember. It was pretty fun, and the setting was great. The North Americans were better than the Southern Americans - I guess the United States is the home of jazz, so that figures.

Yesterday, Tuesday, we went to visit the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende. Originally started as an art collection to support Allende's socialist government in Chile, it soon turned into a underground organisation, all the paintings kept under lock and key by the military junta. It's back in action now - most of it is 70's art donated in support of Allende, but there were a couple of exhibits on the 11th September coup and international reaction to it. The whole episode makes my blood boil, so it was well worth the walk out. Not sure about the artwork, but the contemporary photographs and political posters were very interesting.

After that we walked out to the bus terminal, where we purchased some cheap and cheerful tickets from Santiago to Valdivia, about 12 hours south. We grabbed some bread and cheese for lunch, and then started on the long and tortuous journey towards Viña Concha y Toro.

Favourite Bits!

In case you're interested in this sort of thing, we've both made "top ten" lists for our travels through Perú: see fav-tom and fav-kat. We've also added a couple of books to our bibliography.

$250 for a train ticket?!

No no, don't worry. Stuff's not that expensive here... For whatever reason, the Chilean peso is denoted by a dollar sign, $. 'Proper' dollars are written "US$". One thousand pesos is, conveniently, almost exactly one pound, or 60 cents. Certainly makes price conversions a bit easier, although we're both so used to working in US dollars now that it's a bit confusing going back to pounds! We convert stuff from pesos into pounds into dollars now.

Valparaíso and Viña del Mar

If you're going to found a city, I reckon you could do far worse than naming it Valparaíso (Paradise Valley) or Viña del Mar (Vineyard of the Sea). The two cities have basically merged into one another. The former, Valpo for short, is a prosperous port city; the latter, Viña, is a posh beach resort where the rich and powerful own holiday homes. Both are only a couple of hours from Santiago, where we're off to tomorrow.

We're staying in Valpo - it's a bit cheaper, and has a certain charm to it. Much like San Francisco, the city is built in a terrible location, with hills all over the place. The main commercial centre is on the flat bit near the sea, but many of the residential suburbs are balanced on steep slopes overlooking the city. The fun thing about these hills, or cerros, are the ascensores - dotted around are funicular lifts that trundle up and down on tracks. For $120 you can ride up and down them - they're great fun, and the narrow, winding streets of the cerros are interesting to explore.

Yesterday we performed our usual administrative tasks (buying food, finding a hotel etc.). We also visited a book market on a nearby plaza - I succumbed to temptation and bought myself a Pablo Neruda book.

In the evening Katherine went back to the hotel to sleep off the bus journey, whilst I - finally! - got to see the third Lord of the Rings film in the local cinema (English with Spanish subtitles, thank goodness). It was excellent, as expected!

Today we took the train to Viña - only a couple of minutes, tickets are $250 a pop. Our first stop was an old quinta (or hacienda) that's been restored and done up, and now has some gorgeous gardens with all kinds of palm trees and flowers. Then we stopped in a supermarket to get lunch (chip butties! and nectarines for health), and ate it on a nearby Plaza with some live music (which soon turned into a clown show, to our dismay...).

After lunch we walked to the beach, and spent a lazy afternoon getting sunburnt and dipping our toes in the Pacific.

We got the train back, stopped off in a supermarket (ooh! proper supermarkets!) to buy Katherine a new book to continue writing her diary in - she's obviously been too effusive. Then we took an ascensor up to one of the cerros, and walked back down. We've just stopped in an internet café to do our e-mail, and this blog of course, and then we'll head back to the hotel for tea (bread and cheese, and soup, tonight - and more nectarines for health).

Tomorrow we'll catch the bus to Santiago, capital of Chile (as I'm sure you know).

Calama - Valparaíso

Calama is a couple of hours away from San Pedro, and the largest city in the area. From there, we caught a bus southwards to Valparaíso - a mammoth 22 hour journey! Luckily, buses here are very very good, quite a bit nicer than National Express and Greyhound. The seats go way back, and have funny little calf-rests that pop up under your feet. We got three films (Angel Eyes, Matrix Revolutions - a pirated version! -, and Showtime); pillows; blankets; free snacks, tea and coffee, and even a cheese sandwich for tea!

Potable Water

Chile is sufficiently 'civilised' to have potable (drinkable) tap water almost everywhere (San Pedro is one of the few exceptions). This means we can save on money and toothpaste by drinking tap water - with a bit of Tang in, of course!.

And save it we need to in Chile. It's noticeably more expensive than Perú and Ecuador. Hotels generally cost us about USD8 a night in the Andean countries further north. Here we usually pay closer to USD12 for the same standard (ie. low!). Of course, the trade off is cleaner streets, potable water, proper supermarkets, fewer beggars and very good buses. Indeed, many of the plazas and shops in Chile could quite easily be found in, say, Spain itself.

Because of the price, we're zooming through Chile pretty quickly. We're going to be heading south in the next few days - we'll cross into Argentina (whose collapsed-economy means that it's now quite a bit cheaper...) in Patagonia at the southernmost point of the continent and head north at a more leisurely pace.

1st January 2004 (Day 174)

We'd arranged another tour for the first day of 2004. This one is an afternoon thing, so we were able to sleep in. We stumbled out of bed in time for lunch - yummy pizza - and bought our bus tickets from San Pedro back to Calama. The tour left at 4pm. Our guide took us (and 13 other people) on a tour of the Valle de la Luna and the Valle de la Muerte. There were some spectacular views over the former, then a stroll through the latter. Next we visited an old salt mine and the Tres Marías - natural mineral sculptures -, and then at about 7.30pm headed towards the Great Dune in the Valle de la Luna. We climbed the damn thing - exhausting and (for Katherine at least) scary - and reached the top just in time to watch the sun set over the desert to the west of us. It was amazing watching the shadows lengthen over the sand. Finally everything was grey, save the volcano in the distance, which glowed orange in the setting sun. We arrived back in San Pedro at 9pm, bought a three-litre bottle of Coke and drank it in about sixty seconds (thirsty work those sand dunes).

New Year's Eve in San Pedro de Atacama

So we returned home from our first desert adventure, had lunch, bought some wine and a bunch of grapes, and then went to sleep for a couple of hours.

We woke up at about 8pm, had something to eat, and then at 11pm headed to the Plaza de Armas to see in the Nuevo Año. We sat by the flashing and tuneful Christmas tree - there weren't all that many people around, probably only about 20, so it was quite peaceful.

We had an FM radio, but the stupid station we were listening to didn't bother to 'bong' at midnight, nor did the church on the square. Maybe it's not something they do in Chile... Anyway, a big siren went off somewhere at about the right time, so we decided that that must be the right time.

The Spanish have a fun New Year's tradition - you're supposed to eat one grape after each bong, so twelve in total. Because we didn't have any bongs to listen to, we thought we'd go with seconds (according to my watch) instead. Big mistake. You can replicate the ensuing disaster at home - try eating a grape a second for twelve seconds and you'll realise after about three that it's impossible (that's what Katherine did). If you plough on regardless, you'll realise that after about eight you're choking to death (as I did). Important Lesson: one bong does not equal one second.

Anyway, we finished off the remaining grapes and the wine (Chilean red, very posh!), then made our way back to our hotel. The streets were a bit fuller by now - South Americans like to burn effigies of famous people from the old year, so we had to squeeze our way past a couple of ferocious blazes. We watched some fireworks from the porch, and then retired at about 1am.

Inca Chess

At last, I beat the computer (on skill level 1 :) at Inca Chess. If you're so inclined, you can follow the details of our titanic battle. If not, the position a couple of moves before checkmate was this. Black to move, and mate in four. If you can't work it out (duh) here's the solution.

¡Feliz Año Nuevo!

Happy New Year everyone! Details of our Nuevo Año in San Pedro de Atacama coming up...